Miaow!

Well, we seem to have acquired a kitten. It arrived in our kitchen this morning, in a bit of a state, and was reluctant to leave. Since we'd seen it earlier playing in the road, we decided to keep it in the house for the moment and knock on doors around here to see who it belongs to. Nobody answered in any of the houses I went to, but I did leave notes in them all. Mind you, it looks as if it's been out in the rough for at least a couple of nights, so I think it must have come from further afield. Jon's checked the post office noticeboards and stuff - nothing. If nobody comes to claim it, we've promised Emily we can keep it.

"It" - henceforth to be known as either a) Chocolate, b) Scruffles or c)Panther (tbc) is a bit on the wild side - keeps flinging itself at people and clinging to their legs (ouch) and goes a bit manic every 20 minutes or so, but the rest of the time it's gorgeous. Very sweet and soft, very purry. Personally I more than half hope it stays. We had been wanting a kitten, after all.

Before the kitten arrived and threw the day into chaos, we had been going to have a T-shirt crafts day. Emily made a Tudor montage of pictures in Word this morning, and we printed it out onto transfer paper and it's made a lovely t-shirt. Then we boiled up some grated beetroot from the garden and tried tie-dying another one. It's gone a lovely deep pink colour.....all over. Despite knotting and scrunching and tying and whatever, there's no pattern, just all over colour. Ahem. Obviously we didn't do that quite right!! We were going to do another dye from tea leaves too, but that boiled dry whilst we were being enchanted by "it", so....

I have absolutely no idea what Jon and Emily got up to yesterday, as I spent the entire day in absolute agony with lower back pain. I'd had niggling pain for about a week, but suddenly yesterday it was absolute paralysis - even got stuck on the toilet, to my embarrassement!! Getting into or out of a chair was impossible, let alone walking up and down stairs. Anyway. Emily was extremely patient with her invalid mother, and she and Jon seemed to have fun pottering away all day. My back's a fair bit better now, much to my relief - I had thought at one point I was going to be damaged for life!